


in unheard-of contradictions

by mercuryhatter



Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Backstory, Compulsion, Friendship, Gen, Other Additional Tags to Be Added, Panic Attacks, Post-Apocalypse, Recovery, Season/Series 05, Trans Characters, Trans Martin Blackwood, Trans Michael Shelley, mag 101: another twist, mag 47: the new door, unreality
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-05-18
Updated: 2020-06-16
Packaged: 2021-03-03 02:08:41
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 5,245
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24257173
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mercuryhatter/pseuds/mercuryhatter
Summary: "You think you have mastered it, but just as you get well under way in following, it turns a back-somersault and there you are. It slaps you in the face, knocks you down, and tramples upon you."The Yellow Wallpaper,Charlotte Perkins Gilmanin the new world, michael rebuilds himself and, with the help of the archivist, untwists himself. or: michael shelley's quest to shake jonah magnus down for backpay.
Relationships: Martin Blackwood/Jonathan "Jon" Sims | The Archivist, Michael | The Distortion & Jonathan "Jon" Sims | The Archivist, Minor or Background Relationship(s), michael | the distortion & jonathan "jon" sims | the archivist & martin blackwood
Comments: 32
Kudos: 113





	1. prologue

**Author's Note:**

> the title is also from the yellow wallpaper-- the yellow wallpaper was a spiral manifestation, idk what you want from me.

Michael was… dispersed. 

It took him a long time to realize it, but of course it made sense once he came to it. The Spiral twisted around and around; it did not break, it had no disconnections. Like the Watcher, it was something that meant endless, no start, no stop, just deeper down and further out. So when one piece of Michael after another after another undulated awake they got there eventually, for as much as they could find a there to get to. Stretched  _ nearly  _ past the point of endurance, but then held there. Twisted  _ nearly _ beyond recognition, but there was really nowhere else to go. 

He was angry with it, and it was angry with him, and all of the pieces of each were warped in anger with each other, an forever-loop of wrong. It burned, which was odd. They used to breathe in these spaces of not where the fractals shivered and bloomed, but this was wrong because it was from without. Michael had brought it with him, or made it from himself, but either way it did not belong to Esmentiras. Which was also odd. Things did not belong to anyone here; there was rarely a distinction between  _ things _ and  _ anyone _ . Michael remembered when he was the realm of lies itself: he wore himself to speak and touch and cajole and frighten but that bag of bones was no different than the mirrors and doors that brought it forth. 

Things were different now. Things no longer simply were; things could belong or not belong. There were things that were Michael’s and things that were not.

It felt sometimes like the Spiral was trying to squeeze him out, like the human body pushes out a splinter, the flesh around the intruder contorting and infecting with the effort because the pain was worth having the foreign thing outside of you again. But Michael Shelley had done Gertrude’s job well, and no matter how much the body strained it could not force out its own rejected organ. 

Michael did not think that the Spiral knew the extent to which he was still here, did not know what it would do if it realized, so he shifted when it moved around him and bent with its contortions and generally did not make a fuss. He listened to the scattering tap of Helen’s heels and when he could string enough of himself together to do it he started to form the shape of the Spiral in his mind, mapping its senseless turns. When he thought he could get away with it he would unbraid parts of himself from the parts of the Spiral that they were twisted up with, slowly consolidating more and more that belonged to him and not to it. 

When the Eye Opened everything took notice, even the corridors and even Michael. For many terror-filled moments he felt the lance of that inexorable Gaze and was terrified that the sudden flood of Knowing would reveal the remainders of him to the Distortion and he would be scattered again, forced to start from scratch. He no longer believed that the Distortion could truly destroy him, but he had no desire to find out how thoroughly it could scramble him. 

But for the Spiral to know itself was a contradiction. Michael was safe, at least, from that. They continued on as they had been, dampened a bit under the heavy blanket of  _ knowing _ that polluted the firmament, but the Distortion carried on with its work and Michael built himself quietly in the background. By the time Helen decided to visit the Archivist and his beloved, Michael was almost a self. 

\--

“Is that a  _ postcard _ ?” Martin asked incredulously, stooping to pick up the little square of cardstock left where there had moments before been a threshold. Jon grabbed his shoulder to stop him, peering at the card. 

“It’s  _ not _ a postcard,” he said, but picked it up anyway, holding it gingerly by the corner. Martin couldn’t see what about it wasn’t a postcard, but Jon didn’t seem as revolted by it as he had been by the not-tea. He was curious, turning it in his hands to read it, though still holding it only by the edges. From what Martin could see, the front of the card was a picture of a mirror in a dark room, reflecting a mirror so that the image was doubled in smaller and smaller iterations until it made Martin dizzy and he had to look away. The paper was black, and the handwriting on the other side flashed like oil. 

“Jon? What does it say?” Martin prompted. Jon visibly shook himself, clearing his throat. His voice came out high and quiet. 

“It says  _ I am Michael. I gave you my statement, Archivist. Give me back. _ ” 

“Okay,” Martin said slowly, drawing out the vowels. “Okay, what does that mean? I thought the Spiral was Helen now-- didn’t Michael, what, die?” 

“I thought so,” Jon said, dropping the postcard delicately on a dusty table. “I mean,  _ something _ certainly happened to him, he screamed and then we never saw him again, so I assumed… but I suppose that was a rather large assumption to make, with things like- like us.” 

“I guess,” Martin murmured, feeling his own frown begin to mirror Jon’s, a small, pinched look. It had been a while since Martin had seen him uncertain like this. He offered his hand, and Jon slipped his fingers into it without looking. “But what does it mean? Does Michael want something? Why wouldn’t he just come talk to us the way Helen does?” 

“I suppose I should take a look,” Jon said with a sigh, hand twitching in Martin’s. 

“Is that safe?”

“Oh, yes. The Distortion has been weak as long as we’ve known it, after what Gertrude did, and Helen was right. I’m far more powerful than it is now. If I want… it won’t even know that I’m there.” He still looked nervous, though, for all the strength of his words, so Martin gave his hand a reassuring squeeze. 

“I’ll be right here,” he said. The words settled like a comfortable weight between them, Jon’s face uncreasing a bit in their wake. He gave a small smile, closed his eyes, and then Opened them. 

Martin felt the static immediately, the hairs on his neck standing up in response, but it wasn’t unnerving to him by now. Not quite comforting, but familiar, and the change in air quality tasted more of Jon than it did of fear. Jon’s eyes opened wider than a human should be able to and the air shimmered most thickly around him, the very space around his head and shoulders seeming to wink with faint, watching eyes as well. 

“ _ I have already given you my statement, Archivist _ ,” he said, his voice smiling and thready and faintly wistful. Michael’s voice. “ _ I have more to give, of course. I am new now. The last story you got from me was only half my own, and new ones always grow. But not from in here. Look at me, Archivist. See me. I know you can. Do you remember?  _ **_I want you to understand._ ** _ I always have. _ ”

Jon blinked and recovered his own voice, looking to Martin, though the shroud of eyes gathering around him did not fade. “He wants me to…  _ extract _ him from the Distortion. Bring him back, in a way.” 

“What, Michael Shelley? The real Michael? He’s been alive this whole time?” 

“No, no, not exactly. Michael Shelley is definitely dead, but so is the Michael we knew? In a way?” Jon huffed a small laugh, waved his free hand vaguely in the way he did when trying to describe things that he Knew but couldn’t clearly explain. “He’s managed to cut himself off from the Distortion, almost, and he thinks I can pull him the rest of the way out. Like I’ve done with you, and with Daisy. Except the two of you were never really avatars, not the way he is… was? But he’s already reversed much of that himself, so I think, I think that he’s right that I can do the rest.” 

“Okay. Is that… good?”

“I really don’t know,” Jon sighed. “I… it… it seems wrong to leave him in there.” In the lull between words, the static cleared from the air and the cloud of eyes faded, leaving just Jon, looking small and human and sad. “It does, but I don’t know exactly what I’ll be bringing out. I don’t know if there’s enough of Michael Shelley left to remember how to be human or if this is just the Spiral... shredding itself. From what I can see, it’s some of both, but I have no idea how something like that will interact with the real world. If it will be dangerous, or even if it will be able to tolerate existence here.” 

“Probably more likely now than before, I’d think,” Martin said. “I mean, the rules are different now, right?” They sat for a moment in silent consideration before Martin nudged Jon gently. “I think you have to try, Jon.” 

“Yes,” Jon huffed. “I think you’re right.” 


	2. regarding: changes

“Statement of Michael. Regarding… changes. Statement given direct to Archivist, date… not really. Statement begins.

“Becoming Michael had hurt. Physically, of course, there was the surgery, and Michael Shelley had always been afraid of needles, taking the bus to the clinic every other week for years so that the nurse could do his injections while he closed his eyes. Emotionally; he lost everything but his job in the fallout, had barely avoided crying in Gertrude’s office when she looked at him blankly over her papers and shrugged as he explained his name change. But it was good pain for the most part. Pain for growth, pain for long-denied happiness, pain for a hard-won new beginning. Pain with a purpose and an endpoint, and after a couple of years it was pain that had faded to a distant background hum, almost irrelevant most of the time.

“Of course, I wonder now how much of that was due to the Mother’s machinations. Michael Shelley never noticed the cobwebs in Emma Harvey’s hair, nor the ones on his desk or in his coat. Michael Shelley never noticed  _ anything _ . He was clouded, and lied to, and made ready. But the decision to become Michael… that is the last decision I can clearly remember making for myself, when I was him. And of course, neither the spiders nor the watchers felt the need to intervene too much, not when transition was such an  _ effective _ method of cutting Michael Shelley off from anyone who might have noticed his slow downfall. Gertrude did not care; Elias, newly ascended, made it  _ easy.  _ Useful, of course, to make Michael Shelley feel in his debt. Useful, to make the Institute the only place he could safely exist. 

“Becoming  _ Michael _ was different. The Spiral has no purpose and  _ certainly _ no ending-- no beginning either, for that matter. It does not grow; it twists. It had laughter, but no happiness. Doors opened and closed without safety or protection, the body that Michael had shaped for himself was reshaped; his mind-- never anything special, hardly even his own, but it was still all he had-- it broke under Gertrude’s betrayal like a blown-empty eggshell. Michael Shelley did not survive it, but “Michael” did, and that was something. It was enough of something that the option of non-existence was not there, and even if it had been I do not think I would have taken it. No ends, no beginnings, just the endless twist and turn-- so “Michael” kept going. He opened doors, he paced corridors, he deceived and he laughed. There was something in the Spiral that felt native to him. It wormed into his mind and found all of his hidden terrors: the fear of accusations of deception that kept him from dating or trying to make friends, the way he hid parts of himself that he didn’t even mind for fear of being found out. There was the memory of how wrong our body had felt before he changed it, but also that memory’s mirror in how he tried to flatten the inflections from his voice and still the movements of his hands to fit someone else’s definition of  _ man _ . The dysphoria when it had been red and raw and undeniable, but also the dysphoria that dragged and dampened him as he lied to doctors and cherry-picked at his personality in his quest to do everything  _ right _ . 

“Still, there was something indestructible about how it felt to be the Spiral. There was no right here, or right was wrong, or both were twisted up together and impossible to distinguish. What was done to him should have annihilated him, and instead it merely contorted him. That had a certain security to it, as much as anything was secure in his halls. He could go on like this forever, he was sure, and now he was the changer instead of the one being changed. He enjoyed that part, and how there were no consequences for what could be perceived as deceit here. He was made of deceit now. It wasn’t so much that no one questioned him that made him feel safe, but that all they  _ could _ do was question, and that he never, ever had to give them an answer. 

“Becoming “Helen,” then, was a new kind of betrayal. There was something about it that felt like his first puberty, his own nature twisting him into something he wasn’t. I was  _ Michael _ .  _ Helen _ had no place here. She should not have even still existed for me to be forced into, should have long since been consumed like anyone else the Spiral had taken in. But the Spiral was not quite whole since Sannikov Land, and had grown only more unstable since. A moment of distraction was more than I could afford, and you, Archivist, were nothing  _ but _ moments of distraction. 

“You see, the Spiral itself is… intrigued by the Archivist. It liked being seen by him, liked how the Archivist’s power was  _ almost _ enough to pin him down, to really See it, but not quite there yet. That precipice-point of certainty-uncertainty was where the Spiral loved to balance the best. But in the presence of the Archivist,  _ Michael _ could almost remember where its dividing lines had once been, between  _ it _ and  _ him _ . While that too was intriguing in its danger, it was not a condition the Spiral could allow to continue. The almost-not-quite detangling of human and entity, seeing strands of anger and love and betrayal that had once been a person laid out next to knots of fear and primal creation-destruction-creation that had been pulled from persons once, but were not of them anymore. The promise of annihilation to both that the Archivist wasn’t yet strong enough to fulfill. 

“Giving their statement had been foolish, but Michael and Distortion alike knew they had to kill the Archivist before he learned his power fully enough to return the favor. The motivations were myriad, like the walls inside them: Part of me wanted to give our statement as a sort of final gift to you. Part simply wanted to see what would happen, see how separated our strands could be before something snapped. But all parts of the Distortion and everything that lived and died inside it were surprised when _ I  _ said, with once-flesh lips and endless, truthful throat: “I want you to understand.” 

“In all our intrigue and hubris and curiosity, I forgot that we were still fragile, and that something in the halls was still undigested. 

“For a moment, I thought I was safe. I didn’t give you everything, after all, for all that you stared as hungrily as if I had. A door came to my hand easily enough, but the moment you touched it I felt all at once the wrongness of it, the lock that should never have turned, the inexorable  _ clack _ of new heels behind it… and the final twist was simply too much. Despite all the endless malleability of the human-once-human mind, “Michael” finally shattered at the force of it, at the feel of the Archivist’s Eye, at the furious burn of being understood in a form that repelled understanding with a violence that we could not stand against. He contorted again until he was nothing but the last echo of a scream and “Helen” stood there instead, clothed in  _ my _ power, talking to the Archivist  _ I _ knew. She was a rebirth again, but not for “Michael” anymore-- not for me. A step away from the failure at Sannikov Land, a twist closer to she-is-not-what-she-is. She disposed of my face, but kept my laugh in her throat, a mockery inside and out, and the Spiral grew gleefully around it.

“Statement ends.”

Jon blinked himself back to normal, feeling almost sleepy in his satisfaction, and surprised by the feeling. 

“Huh. That was… nice, actually. Thank you?” Michael laughed, high and bright. Odd to hear that laugh from a singular voice, not refracted back in on itself, just… a man, laughing. 

“You’re welcome, Archivist. I believe my theory was right. I feel better too.” Michael started off again across the scraggly grass, meeting gazes with the unnerving sky. It certainly was a strange new world the Archivist had built, all the fears right on the surface, doing as they pleased out in the open under the silent Eye. They had passed through realms belonging to Corruption, Slaughter, Stranger, and Buried, and seemed to assume that each of the rest of them still lay ahead, between them and their quest. Elias Bouchard, up in his tower. It was funny-- Michael hadn’t known Elias well, certainly hadn’t questioned it when he was promoted to Head, though others around him had. Still, even then, when everything was so falsely clear and sensible to Michael, he wouldn’t have pegged Elias for the world domination type. 

Jon and Martin walked with such determination in this world, with a hope that surprised Michael given how clear-eyed they both were. Michael associated  _ hope _ with  _ false _ , or else with  _ blind _ , but the Archivist by nature could not be blind, and neither he nor Martin were much for being false. It was refreshing, but not reassuring. For his part, Michael was simply content to have the chance to die like everyone else, separate and singular. Jon and Martin had made that possible for him, so he was happy to walk with them, and help where he could. Giving Jon statements when tapping into the fear around him was too much, making sense of the unreal as they picked their way through it, even something as small and mundane as talking to Martin when Jon was off communing with the eyeball-- Martin’s phraseology. 

Michael liked talking to Martin. It was interesting to talk to someone so clearly marked and yet so separate from the powers around him. Michael didn’t really know what it meant to be  _ human _ anymore, whether that was any more or less desirable than any other state of being, but whatever it was, he felt like Martin was doing it the loudest, and it was nice to be around. When he brought this up, though, Martin looked confused, and Jon just looked sad, and neither of them seemed to fully understand what he meant, so he didn’t press. 

They were winding closer to the land of the dead, now, which Michael found very funny in ways that Jon and Martin also didn’t seem to understand. 

  
“It’s the  _ end _ , and we haven’t even reached the  _ middle _ yet,” he tried to explain, but it wasn’t the sort of humor Jon was good at, and Martin was distracted. Or maybe it just wasn’t very funny. Michael could admit that it had been quite a while since he had a sense of humor appropriate to any given situation. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I've never known what a story structure is in my life and I'm certainly not about to start knowing for a distortion biography. next time: maybe some other perspectives! maybe we'll see how Helen has been doing!
> 
> oh, and if you recognize the statement from this chapter, I reworked it from a previous work of mine that I hadn't been fully happy with. sorry for the repetition if you happened to read it before I took it down!


	3. regarding: spiral fractures

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> chapter warnings: panic attack, body horror, manipulation

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> this wasn't the chapter that was intended to come next, but then I realized two things: one is that I'm under no obligation to recognize the hegemony of linear time when writing about the spiral, and the other is that this is my house and I can do whatever I want. so, here's whatever this is.

The stretch of land between one domain and the next was empty, impossibly flat and featureless for the geography they  _ should _ have been crossing. Nothing changed except for the size of the panopticon in the distance, growing infinitesimally closer as they walked. The grayish light, the sandy dirt, the occasional patch of straggling grass, all remained the same until one fear or another acted upon it. 

So the bright yellow wildflowers Michael kept catching glimpses of when he turned his head, the ones that slipped away when he followed them with his eyes, those could not be innocent variation.

Still, he waited until the colors were crowding insistently in his periphery, threatening to reach out and grab him if he let his attention slip, to voice the inevitable. 

“We’re nearly there.” His hands were quivering limply by his sides-- he kept wanting to twist them together, give his mounting dread an outlet, but whenever he slipped and did it he felt he could see his fingers getting longer and longer. 

“Where?” Martin asked. Michael laughed, and when the sound hit the air it radiated like a fracture-- like a fractal. The sound of it almost made him scream and his vision finally spun out of his control, making him unconscious of Martin’s hand on his arm, Jon’s concerned face getting closer. 

“He means we’re getting close to the-- you know. The land that isn’t,” Jon said quietly when it became clear that Michael could not give a meaningful answer. His careful avoidance of any name he’d heard the Spiral called before made Michael laugh again, hands opening and closing frantically, grasping nothing. It was a valiant effort, he supposed, but he had told the Archivist from the very beginning that names meant nothing to it. 

“It-is-not-but-it-is. That’s where we’re going now. She always meant me for  _ Es Mentiras.. _ . Archivist?” Michael pulled his eyes away from the multiplying wildflowers that threatened them and met Jon’s instead. “Archivist, do not lose me there. Destroy me instead. It will hurt less from you, please. Do it now, even, I cannot go back into it, Archivist, please--”

Martin’s protests were lost to Michael in the familiar-unfamiliar roaring-- familiar, because he knew it, but unfamiliar, because it could never be known-- and he would fall to it right here, before they ever even made it to the place of power, perhaps his escape from the very beginning had only ever been just another hallway, perhaps--

“ _ MICHAEL. Tell me your story.” _

Michael gasped at the sudden power in the air, static punching through his swirling panic and taking hold of him, a breathtakingly linear spear of  _ knowing. _ The Eye reached in and regimented his thoughts into formation; though they still twisted down and down, he could follow their path now. He breathed out, a weak  _ heh _ , and began. 

“Spiral fracture,” he said. “A break that  _ twists _ the bone as it snaps. Most common in young children. It looks like stairs-- a little spiral staircase in the bone.  _ Ha. _ Such a natural place for a foothold, when the thing climbing them does not have feet. I always confused them with  _ radial fractures _ , you see, but radial does not always mean to radiate in a circle. Sometimes it simply means one end of the radius bone. Do you see, Archivist? Well. Of course  _ you _ see. 

“That was what I was in school for, back when. Biology. I wanted to be a doctor!  _ Ha. _ Oh… I wasn’t yet Michael, except in my mind. Mostly I was called  _ dyke _ or  _ bitch _ or  _ weirdo _ , to be frank. But Ryan,  _ he _ was Ryan through and through, and I think I may have loved him. But the  _ fear… _ well. Of course I could never tell him. And then he was no longer there to be told. Fell through a door, just like me, someday. And of course I never did find him in there. Oh, well. 

“It took weeks for him. He started slowly, but oh, when he shattered… He very nearly took me with him right then. I held him and he  _ cried _ , he cried and cried and told me about his dreams of the hallways with no end, of the twitching, grasping things he could see in the mirror, but only when he did not look too close. I had to stop wearing my paisley jacket, because he told me the patterns were reaching for him, between the threads. He was worried he would fall right in. Perhaps he would have. But in the end it was the trapdoor that took him-- simply opened up in the night as he crossed the floorboards to take the tea I had made for him, and swallowed him whole. It missed his scream, though… his scream echoed in the room for hours. 

“I mentioned the fractures, didn’t I? The twisting snap of bone? I fell oddly when I was a child, grasped for a tree branch but grabbing hold twisted me around and broke my arm. I do not think it healed very well; and once when Ryan was full of fear he grabbed for me to catch him and cracked it right back open again. Feet that aren’t, tapping up the halls in my marrow. 

“I left school after Ryan fell. I had missed so many classes taking care of him anyway, I was hopelessly behind and besides, I was no longer interested in the things that made human bodies tick or tock, but in the things from elsewhere that might make them stop. In the sound of feet along my halls-- or someone else’s then, but they would be mine, one day. I sought them out, though of course I did not know about the spiderpaths I followed. I simply knew that I was alone and I was afraid, and in the glare of the house of sighted power, swaddled in thread, I was less so. My arm never hurt there, stitched together with eight busy, unseen hands. 

“The lies… oh, I wonder if Gertrude knew how well they prepared me for my end’s beginning. If she knew that my trust in her, shattered, would put such a delightful icing on the cake consumed by the halls that aren’t. She probably did. Why else affect her grandmother’s guise, play on my lost-child need to be useful, to be needed? I was so young when I began. It must have been so easy to shape me. Like… well. Like wet clay. 

“That is what the halls were made of, when I followed Gertrude’s map down. Wet, dripping, sliding clay. The Worker in their center, remolding them for the new world. He reached out to me with arms far too long, the length of the entire rest of his body several times over, but then of course I was next to him, and they had never been so long at all. He looked too as if he was made of clay, feet rooted into the ground, the material spiraling up him as he worked, dripping down his hair and over his ears. His face was  _ alive _ with movement, writhing and dancing and screaming like it wanted to crawl away, but he still  _ smiled _ at me when his horrible hand wrapped around my arm. I felt that smile down in the covered-over broken place in my bone, and that’s where he crawled in. And then, as instructed, though I hadn’t understood it at the time…  _ I  _ crawled back out.”

Michael came back to himself with a shuddering breath, finding with dulled surprise that he was clutching Jon’s arms, that Martin was nearly holding him up from behind. Their eyes pinned him from both sides and he felt grateful for the scrutiny, keeping him from wiggling away. 

“Michael?” Martin asked. His voice was heavy and gentle, like footsteps if footsteps could be trusted. Michael nodded. “Hey! Thank you for telling us all that. Look, you were there with us in the Lonely. You know we won’t leave you, and we won’t lose you. We are  _ all _ getting to Elias, okay?” 

As if that was a comforting destination. Michael jackknife-bent into himself and Martin let him go, sinking to the unsteady ground in a heap. They sat with him, Martin and Jon, Martin’s hand on Jon’s knee as they waited. 

In the end, of course, there was nothing else to be done. They moved forward or not at all. 

\--

It was much later that Michael’s thoughts felt ordered enough for him to speak again. The bleak landscape was calm enough now, if one didn’t look too closely at it, and the three of them walked very near to each other, shoulders almost brushing with the rhythm of their steps. 

“You’re much more powerful now, you know,” Michael said, and Jon huffed quietly. 

“I’m aware,” he said, tired. Michael wondered how many times he’d heard it before, how many times it had to be said before he began to believe it. How many times more before he began to lean into it. 

“Do you remember when you took Helen Richardson’s statement? When she  _ was _ Helen Richardson?” Jon looked surprised at the question. 

“I-- yes, I suppose I do. You, uh--”

“I stabbed you, yes, that isn’t what I mean,” Michael interrupted, waving the incident away and ignoring Martin’s disapproving look and faint “you did  _ what _ ?” “I mean before that. It took you so long to get her to tell you her story in a way you could comprehend, do you remember? I know you were young in your power then, but not so young that you hadn’t spun stories of people’s nightmares before, shaping a boundless trauma into something with a beginning and a middle and an end. But it took you several tries with her, didn’t it? That is what the Liar does. You two are opposed, you see-- the one who lies, the one who sees all terrible truths. We could resist you then, to a degree.” 

“And now?” Martin asked, clearly interested. Michael felt his mouth do something strange, like it was trying to smile and frown at once, so he just laughed hollowly to give it something to do. 

“Well, you both know the answer to that. You could kill her without even breaking a sweat, Archivist. You could kill her without even realizing you were doing it.” 

“Do you want me to kill her, Michael?” Jon asked. He had stopped walking, and now turned to pin Michael directly with his eyes, his tone cool and clinical, compulsion on his tongue. 

“I don’t know,” Michael said, and of course it was the truth. 

“Would killing her destroy the Spiral?” The compulsion mounted. So soon after giving his statement, it hurt a little, like carbonation in Michael’s nose. 

“Oh, certainly not.” 

“Would it destroy the Distortion?” 

“Now that’s a more interesting question…  _ ouch, _ ” Michael said reproachfully, the Eye’s sharp little claws digging more insistently behind his eyes. “Stop it.”

“ _ Will it?” _

“Jon, stop it,” Martin said sharply, hand suddenly firm on Jon’s arm.

“I’m sure I don’t know, Archivist, but I think it probably would,” Michael hissed, even as Jon blinked hard and started to retreat. It was too late for the effects of his efforts; Michael strolled casually several meters away from where Martin was now talking in a stern whisper to Jon and vomited onto the faintly shifting dirt. As they started forward once again, Michael remained several steps ahead of the other two, and did not speak again. 

**Author's Note:**

> find me on tumblr @santhomedusae!


End file.
